


bury my love

by warmth



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-09
Updated: 2015-06-09
Packaged: 2018-04-03 11:14:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4098988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/warmth/pseuds/warmth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He loved you, Steve," the soldier replies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	bury my love

**Author's Note:**

> many many thanks to my lovely [kristen.](//majorbucky.tumblr.com) your angry skype messages practically write everything on their own.  
> \+ the rest of u can find me at [buckystevc](//buckystevc.tumblr.com) on tumblr dot com, we can all get together and cry.  
> ++ title comes from moondust by jaymes young.

He finds Steve Rogers the night before he gets on a plane out to Europe.

"I'm going to leave for a long time," he says quickly. Rogers is bleary eyed, which is good. He's easier to handle when he's surprised. "don't come looking, okay?"

"Bucky," Rogers says. He looks forlorn. Lost.

"I don't want to kill you, but I could if I had to."

The soldier feels jittery. He feels like he's going to rattle out of his skin. Rogers gives him a long look with his hand on the doorframe.

The soldier shifts his weight. The apartment is bugged and an agent lives three doors down and here he is risking everything to stand outside Rogers’ door without any real reason as to why. Some idiotic, visceral gut instinct. Some debt to repay. He swallows and fixates on a random point over Rogers' shoulder.

Rogers says, "Stay. I can make sure they won't hurt you, Bucky, please. I - I don’t think I can lose you again."

He's shaking when he touches the soldier's shoulder under the jagged line of loose hair. The soldier sighs.

“Your friend is dead, Captain.” He sticks his hands in his pockets, “I could barely remember his name on my own.”

His five-minute widow has run its course.

He lets Rogers have another anyway before he slips down into the stairwell and keeps walking, away and away and—

 

-

 

The soldier does not come back for a long time. He goes to Russia and Illinois, hides out in underground shelters and old HYRDA safe houses, sees elephants in India, baptisms in Brooklyn. There is a botanical garden in England and a clear patch of sand on a beach on the coast of Brazil and three shots to the head on an empty road somewhere deep in Austria. He shatters his collarbone in Romania and hides out in the back of a tourist’s abandoned blue jeep for three days before he appropriates a ticket for a plane flying into Johannesburg. It's good work and it comes naturally to him.  

There is a lot to do. He does not come back for a long time.

 

- 

 

They manage to corner him exactly once, a cathedral in St. Petersburg. He sits in the pews and waits patiently. The glock is easy to conceal. His suit is nondescript. he keeps his body soft and relaxed. The problem is the hesitation. Even with his twisted morals, he's reluctant to kill a man in church.

SHIELD agents don't have the same reservations, apparently. There is a flash behind his eyes and then he's quieting the the first roll of nausea with a tight clutch on his shoulder. The soldier grits his teeth and contemplates the benefits of crushing her trachea. There are zero. He leaves it alone and shoots his target on Tuesday behind an empty café.  

He shaves his head the first chance he gets, which is in a cheap Colorado motel room after finding calm in undoing the bandages crisscrossing his shoulder. He changes the name on his passport, walks differently, keeps the glint of his metal arm away from the sunlight. The jobs are dirty and quick but not always conspicuous. Sometimes he is in places for weeks at a time and despite all his precaution, he knows that someone is bound to recognize him again, the shape of his jaw, the ridge in his nose, the green wet color of his eyes over the rim of his sunglasses.

“Keep your head down,” Rogers tells him. They’re at a farmer’s market in France that should've closed an hour ago.

“I thought I told you not to find me,” he says, quirking a pained smile at a dimpled avocado. The soldier pretends to weigh it in his hand, shuffles to the left to make room for what he hopes appears to be some chatty blonde stranger.  

Rogers makes a small huff, almost pleased, and he stares at where Rogers’ shoe has come untied.

“I didn't want to,” Rogers hesitates, “not like this, but they’re planning something, Bucky. They’ll find you. if I can—”

“They can,” the soldier sighs. He doesn’t say anything about Rogers’ use of an old moniker that doesn’t belong to him, one that, he thinks, won’t ever again. “I know.”

There's a murky image in the back of his head, the agent's dark hair and her panic. It makes him draw his cap down a little tighter.

“I can protect you,” there’s something moving about the tone of Rogers' voice, raw and cracked and determined. “but you have to come back with me. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but eventually.”

“Eventually,” he replies, shifting his weight. He thinks of the implications there, and wonders how far eventually can hold for someone like him before it’s taken back.

Rogers looks like he’s waiting for him to say something else. When nothing comes, he buys a couple tomatoes and taps him on the shoulder gently to signal his leave, something almost imperceptible to the naked eye. It sends a phantom tremor skittering across the metal of his arm.

“Just think about it.”

The soldier does not turn, nor does he watch Steve Rogers walk away.

 

-

 

He likes the apartment in Spain. It’s a beautiful, too hot little thing with no air conditioning and bright blue walls like ice. It does not bring back any memories. (There is a dream about a broken tea cup and fragile, skinny fingers around his wrist that keeps surfacing and surfacing and surfacing—)

The soldier does not give himself a name. The bills say Cesar and his passport says Alvin and his handful of plastic I.D. cards say Timothy and Jackson and Kent. They don't feel like him. (He doesn’t try James.)

During the day, he sits on a threadbare mattress, reads the newspaper, listens to water splash on the sand of some faraway beach in long wet rolling squelches. Sometimes he’ll go out at night, interact with a faceless woman, a man with a shock of blonde hair. He lets himself kiss them once before he leaves. Their bodies heave and sweat in an overcrowded nightclub while he moves onto another job, goes home to shower. He thinks they're lucky.

(The cold water reminds him of cryofreeze.)

There are four assault rifles tucked in the back of his closet alone, behind street clothing and various character disguises, M-16, ACR, DK2, AK-47, he likes the way they feel, the way they make _him_ feel, as if through all this drowning and brutal survival he’s in his element, has some semblance of control.

(In his sock drawer there is a manila folder filled with photocopied reports of Captain America’s missions in 1944, his shiny frosted face, the evolutions of the suit. The soldier runs his fingers over the faded reds and browns, over Steve Rogers’ thin pale face and it is a hard thing to justify, even to himself.)

 

-

 

They take him in pieces and he doesn’t struggle. (There’s only so much running a person can do, even someone as good at it as him, and he’s tired, he’s so _tired_ , maybe this will even be good for him, he got his three months free and now a nice clean death is in sight, some kind of closure—) They take his arm and his knives and his shoes, rough up his face and his body before he breaks one of their noses accidentally on instinct and then there’s three darts and a needle and it all goes away.

Rogers comes to see him when he wakes up. He doesn’t say ‘I told you so.’ The soldier wishes he would. Instead, he taps the glass with his knuckles and it’s, “We kept a norse god in this thing, you know. You should feel pretty bad ass.”

The soldier smiles at his bare feet and doesn’t say a thing about how Rogers’ voice trembles. He doesn’t say anything at all.

 

-

 

Rogers is around more often than not, watching him heal and bringing him his meals, toying with his big pale fingers, the strangely gentle bones of his knuckles, telling him stories until his voice runs itself raw. ("I was always dragging you into things,"). His face lights up the day they let the soldier out into another room, with big pillows and an HD camera placed in the corner beneath a light fixture.

“It’s as much a prison as the glass cage was,” the soldier sighs. “don’t look so damn pleased.”

“Can’t help it,” Rogers says, jostling him with a shoulder. He’s whistling. The walls are beige.

“You really can.”

Rogers sighs, “Yeah, well. Give me this one. Neither of us has had very much to be happy about in the past seventy years.”

The soldier processes that for a moment, wonders how much a superhero has to be upset about before his mind falls back to Rogers' trip down beneath the ice and then his, the burning cold of the cryochamber's door on his skin. He thinks they share the same kind of confusion, displacement, and that maybe not remembering is the better end of a raw deal.

(Rogers’ eyes hold some ancient affection for him, something squirmy and uncomfortable and instinctual. The soldier's body wants to open up for him like a split peach.)

He stares at where his metal fingers used to be, where they would lay against the comforter. He does not blink slowly and he does not inch further to make a space for someone else in his bed. It is not an invitation.

Rogers takes it anyway.

 

-

 

It’s not hard to pass time in Stark tower. Rogers lends him books and words and history, offers him some sort of normalcy. If there is nothing else to appreciate about their current dynamic, the soldier at least has this.

Still, despite the captain’s insistence on treating him kindly, there is always something to bind the soldier to them, the organization.  

“It’s a part of him,” Rogers is arguing. “You can’t just take it away.”

“Captain Rogers, sir, with all due respect,” the doctor stammers. Her eyes dart wildly, from the soldier and away again. He sits calmly, naked save for the paper gowns they give at hospitals. She looks at him one more time before her voice pitches low and she grabs Rogers by the collar.

The soldier only catches pieces, _Stark_ and _arm_ and _not authorized_ but it’s enough to know that it won’t happen today. He sighs and cuts Rogers off when he goes to protest.

“Steve, enough,” the soldier says. “You’re not going to get anywhere with this and I don’t know about you, pal, but I like covering my junk with a little more than a napkin.”

 

-

 

(“Do you always bite the hand that feeds you?” the soldier asks, half because he’s curious and half because he’s grateful.

“Yes,” Rogers says. He runs a hand through his hair. It’s kinda charming. His eyes shine like technicolor. “No. I don’t know. I don’t even know who feeds me.”  

The soldier leans forward. Rogers is staring at his mouth. He wonders what it’d be like to have him push a little closer, to climb inside of his body and settle.

“Thank you, anyway,” he whispers, licks his lips, and wakes up.)

 

-

 

“He's um, Fury's a good man,” Rogers says, hovering on the other side of the table. His fingers drum anxiously against the top of the table, blunt fingernails clicking every time they come into contact with the mahogany. He’s awkward when he’s nervous. The soldier thinks it would be refreshing if he didn't feel like an animal on his way to the slaughter.

Rogers says, "I think this will be ... good."

The soldier fidgets with the sleeve of his t-shirt uncomfortably, extends his metal arm just to give himself something to do. The shoulder plate has been replaced and it’s a long stretch of silver now, unbroken by red or scratches, battle scars, pierce’s anger over everything, his perception and his thought process and the way he held a gun like Barnes. Rogers tells him he has Tony Stark to thank for the advancements.

He’s trying to be patient. (The arm makes a whirring sound when it recalibrates, a low deep hum.)

He says, “that’s what you keep saying.”

Rogers is puzzled and embarrassed. The soldier does not react to the way his cheeks pink up. (A mouth whipped by burning cold, fingers holding the scraped empty body of a lighter, wheezing breaths, “Bucky, that you—”)

He shakes his head. They wait for Director Fury in silence.

“Sergeant Barnes,” Fury says upon entry.

“uh,” the soldier says.

“He doesn’t like to be called by his old names,” Rogers pauses then looks at him, “I don’t know what you’d … prefer.”

“It’s okay,” he says, because it’s easier than admitting he doesn’t know either, “it’s okay. Call me whatever. I just want to know why we’re here.”

He remembers this man, his mission, the curving wound of his eye under the patch, the empty sound his body made when it collided with the roof of his car. He remembers this man. The soldier stares at the way he keeps his body and wonders if he’s the type to hold a grudge.

“SHIELD has been watching you. We think you could prove a valuable asset, if you cooperate.”

The soldier eyes him, his stature, the calm way his breath whistles in his chest. He says, flatly, “You’re offering me a job.”

(Something like dread is caught in his chest, and relief, too.)

Rogers’ eyes reflect like coins, marbles, oceans and mirrors and clichés and the soldier can’t manage to look away when he repeats himself, “You’re offering me a job.”

 

-

 

He only agrees to meet the team once it’s crucial, a time which just so happens to coincide with one of his afternoon naps. Rogers tucks a little blue book back into the shelf while he rubs his eyes.

“Your first mission,” Rogers says over the sirens.

“No,” the soldier replies easily, “not really.”

Rogers’ face is stricken.

The soldier doesn’t linger on that. He swallows and turns away to catalogue his gear; he has three knives tucked into his belt. He has his rifles back and a new haircut and an upgraded swath of navy blue kevlar.

(Rogers gives him a smile brighter than capella the first time squeezes his body into it. The soldier’s stomach does not drop out of his body at the sight.)

He knows Clint and Natasha from a lifetime ago, Thor from old myths he picked up during hits, keeps his distance when it comes to Banner, and then there’s Stark, who’s something else altogether.

“It’ll be fun,” Stark says through his face mask, they're perched on a high rise, the man's nearly unintelligible with all the screaming even up this high, “just stay here, kill things, look generally intimidating. A walk in the park for you, Barnes."

The soldier bares his teeth as Stark throws himself off the building and puts Rogers’ head between the crosshairs to center himself. He wonders what they would do if he squeezed the trigger, watched Rogers go down in a red splat. The thought makes his skin crawl. 

 _Things_ are approaching. He thinks, now or never.

There are piles of bodies in the streets. Two men go down with hands on their necks. They die surprised. Empty hosts, he thinks, for whatever the hell’s roaming around inside, something otherworldly, something that reeks of sickness and desperation, then something more, something wanting. The soldier ponders the circumference of a shadow as he steadies his aim on something just out of sight. When it goes down, Rogers raises his hand in a joking salute. He looks relaxed and sweaty.

(“Thank you. for today.” “Fucking mention it again, Steve, and I swear to god—” “What, what are you gonna do, huh? [laughter] Oh, come here, jerk.” Light fragments on the walls, something green like a tent, green like grass, green like army, _army_ —)

The soldier’s head is killing him, a splice of pain down the ridge of his scalp. He wonders if Rogers still smells like mint and sweat even when he fights or if it wears away to blood and burning the same way the soldier’s metal fingers do after every hit.

(Steve Rogers had a mouth like the soft center of a cantaloupe.)

The soldier blinks and fires.

 

-

 

“You were,” Rogers shakes his head. “You were good out there. You seemed in your element.”

“Yeah,” the soldier says. He picks at his boots. Rogers has eyes like salt water. “Yeah, I guess so.”

 

-

 

They ask him about his memories. They ask him about Russia and the cryochamber and Rogers. He thinks of the perpetual frost on his eyelashes. In the back of his head there is death and gore and flying limbs, Barnes' irrational fear of the ocean and whatever went deeper. There is Rogers with his bruises in the shape of Barnes’ mouth and Natalia with her long hair, her light eyes, her gutted smiles. He has ghosts that look at him with nothing but love and it scares him shitless. He’s got no idea what’s real and what isn’t.

Rogers is watching him intently. His face is open and earnest and the back of the soldier’s neck is sweaty.

“There’s nothing,” he says to his hands. His voice is steady, his breathing doesn't get faster, his field of vision doesn't tunnel. Banner looks concerned.

"Buck," Rogers says, reaching out. He feels like he's sucking air in through a straw.

The soldier gasps, “I don’t remember anything, I don’t, I swear, I—"

 

-

 

(“Say we didn’t go to war,” Steve murmurs. It’s raining in Italy and it hides how his voice breaks, “say we stayed in Brooklyn.”

“Like you could stay away.”

“I know,” he smiles into Bucky’s skin. “I know that. But say.”

Bucky stares at the ceiling and, feeling indulgent, says, “You’d be an artist, I’d work at Johnny’s old antiques shop. We’d have a cat named after your ma and a three-legged dog no one else knew how to love right.”

“Three-legged dog, huh?”

“You bet your sweet ass,” Bucky laughs hauling him closer by bare shoulders and holding their mouths together, once, twice, four times. He slides his hand down Steve's neck, presses his thumb into the pulse point and smiles at the thought that he's got Captain America's blood racing for him. He says so.

"Yeah," Steve says. He's always so unflinchingly tender, the kind of honest that makes Bucky's head spin. "yeah, Buck, of course you do.")

(What’s a good memory worth, the soldier thinks, if you can’t bury it?)

 

-

 

“Thought I’d find you out here,” Rogers tells him.

“Why?” the soldier replies. He stares at where his feet dangle over the edge. It’s a long way down. He feels like a caged animal ready to grow wings. The soldier grips concrete blindly to ground himself and his metal fingers leave an indentation.

Rogers shrugs, lowering himself down beside him. “Something Bucky used to do.”

He doesn’t smile but the corners of his mouth make a valiant effort. They don’t say much. He leans his weight into Rogers’ space, just enough to avoid contact.

“Bucky,” the name sits on his tongue, stagnant. “me.”

Rogers looks at him for a long time. “No. No, I don’t think so.”

The sun's setting over the rubble. The soldier contemplates how humans rebuild after disaster, like plants springing up between cracks in the sidewalk.

"Sometimes I wish I could be."

"You're not him, and you don't have to be." Rogers says, firmly. "I'm starting, I mean. I'm trying to get that."

“He loved you, Steve,” the soldier replies. He's shaking with something, maybe tears. He covers his wobbling mouth with the metal hand, “He really fucking loved you and I - "

Thickly, Steve says, "It's okay," he lays a cool hand over the back of the soldier's neck. "it's okay. I already know."

 


End file.
